Friday, June 26, 2015

Some of
you may have read our May 29 blog post, APA Basics, Part One. Today’s post is APA
Basics, Part Two. This post focuses on wording practices according the APA Publication Manual. In both posts, I tried
to follow APA guidelines for style and formatting. Questions or comments are
welcome!

A
Quick Note About Periods

First,
let’s dispense with the debate over how many spaces appear at the end of a
sentence. Though the APA PublicationManual (2010) has stated, “Spacing twice
after punctuation marks at the end of a sentence aids readers of draft
manuscripts” (p. 88), the organization does not specifically require two spaces
at the close of a sentence. According to Carolyn Law, Thesis and Dissertation
Advisor at NIU, “The standard practice in all publishing is now one space after
a period. Period.” For those interested in this practice’s development, Dave
Bricker’s blog, The
World’s Greatest Book, offers a quick look at its history. For now, though,
let’s cover language guidelines.

“Writing
Clearly and Concisely”

“Writing
Clearly and Concisely” is the third chapter in the Publication Manual. This chapter delineates many guidelines for APA
style. Aside from the overarching goal of communication via the fewest words
necessary (“Say only what needs to be said,” APA, 2010, p. 67), APA finds headings
(and subheadings) necessary for organization of material. APA also promotes divisions
of material into parallel bits, such as bulleted or numbered lists. While
writers should emphasize the research and not the researchers, writers still
should construct active voice sentences whenever possible, except for in the abstract.
Oh, and “we” writers should NOT use the editorial “we”; a writer should use
“we” only when the writer is part of a research team referenced.

Verb
Tense and “Noun Strings”

APA instructs writers
to use only past tense and/or present perfect verbs in literature reviews and in
descriptions of procedures done in the past (e.g., “Juarez found” or “The
researchers have discovered”). Past tense must also be used to describe study
results, while the present tense is utilized only to “discuss implications of
the results and to present the conclusions” (APA, 2010, p. 66). For instance, a
statement beginning with the words, “The findings point to a need for …” would
be appropriate.

APA also
tells writers to untangle, or to rearrange, “noun strings” (66). These strings happen
when several nouns accrue “to modify a final noun” (APA, 2010, p. 66). I found
the following example of a noun string from Wikipedia helpful: “Underground
Mine Worker Safety Protection Procedures”; see Wikipedia’s Noun string entry
for more ideas here. Moreover, APA discourages wordiness of any type, such as the
use of a phrase when only one word is needed For example, avoid the
ubiquitous expression “due to the fact that”; instead say, “because.” Other
redundant words or expressions should also be expunged. Writers should avoid
phrases like “summarize briefly…” when a summary, by definition, is brief. So
proofread carefully!

See section 3.09 of the Publication Manual for more tips for clarity.

No
Bias

Finally,
APA is committed to reducing bias in language. As stated in the Publication Manual (2010), “Scientific
writing must be free of implied or irrelevant evaluation of the group or groups
being studied” (p. 70). The general guidelines for doing so are good for any
type of writing: be specific and be deliberate in word choice. APA writers must
acknowledge study participants and describe them with sensitivity for, and
understanding of, the social construction of identity. An example statement that
acknowledges participants while specifying the exact group would read: “Of the
tenth-graders who completed the survey …” as opposed to the following: “Of the
students who were given the study to complete …” When naming groups, use the
identifying terms that each group prefers, and avoid language that “objectifies
a person,” such as “wheelchair bound” (APA, 2010, p. 76). Here, rather state, “People
who require wheelchairs” instead. Most biases are cleared up by being as precise
as possible in description.

Concluding
Thought

Simply,
APA style calls for clear, concise, and specific writing, with some arbitrary rules for certain sections of a document. As mentioned in our previous APA post, the
best source for information is the Publication
Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th edition)
as well as the APA Style website.

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. YouTube. Pinterest. It
can be argued that these social networking sites have made life entertaining,
simpler, and, in some cases, informative. Individuals, researchers, businesses,
and academic institutes venture onto one or more of these sites for a variety
of reasons. However, a question has come up in the Thesis and Dissertation Office:
Should information found on social media be used in a thesis/dissertation?If you were to consult the new-ish page on our
office website labeled Documentation Styles, you would come across the
how-to-cite-social-media link. This is a graphic that explains how to properly
document social media in your thesis/dissertation. Providing said graphic might
imply that the NIU Thesis and Dissertation Office endorses the use of social
media as a form of credible secondary research. But it's not that simple.According to a survey conducted in 2014, the Pew
Research Center reports that 52% of adults who go online have accounts with two
or more social media sites, Facebook being the most popular. Seventy percent of Facebook users and 36% of Twitter users check their
accounts daily (click here to
review data). In 2015 it was reported
that thanks to the ubiquity of Smartphones, 92% of teens go online daily while
24% report being online “almost constantly” (click here to
review data). Earlier this week, it was discovered that 61% of the Millenial
generation go to Facebook for news as opposed to watching local news programs
on television (click here to
review study).You may be wondering, What does any of this have to
do with me or with my field of research? For those of you pursuing degrees in
the sciences, it’s been reported that 47% of scientists affiliated with the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) “use social media to
talk about science or read about scientific developments.” Further, 19% of AAAS
scientists follow the blogs and 12% follow the tweets of various experts in
their fields (click here to
review report). In other words, the professional community relies on
information that is disseminated digitally. As reported in the science journal Nature, there are even sites like
ResearchGate and Academia.edu that are exclusively for researchers and whose
goal is to promote collaboration, peer review, and to share advances in
respective fields (click here to read
article). All of this begs the question: If relying on social
media is good enough for the professional community, why is there is a stigma
associated with citing a piece of research from Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, or
Twitter on one’s thesis/dissertation?Here is the (tentative) conclusion that we arrived
at in the office: Is the information found via social media reliable? Has the
author taken the time to assess the content in order to determine its
legitimacy and overall value to the thesis/dissertation? In the end, this is
what matters most. Given the amount of time people spend on, the
individuals using, and the motivation behind relying on social media, it can be
argued that future generations of graduate students may come to depend more and
more on social media when searching for secondary materials. In time, these
sites will accrue so much information that they will become general studies
databases or even subject-specific databases in their own right, thereby
eliminating any stigma an author might experience when identifying a source on
his or her references page as having come from social media.Then again, in spite of my beliefs concerning
social media, all of the research that I have used in my dissertation thus far
has been copies from professional journals or tracked down in the stacks in
Founders Library. I don’t know why, but I just can’t bring myself to cite a
blog or rely on a Facebook post for research even though I know that they
exist. Maybe the stigma regarding the use of social media in my dissertation is
all in my head.Please feel free to share any comments you might
have about this topic on our blog or Facebook page. By the way, if you’re interested in a laugh, try
reading a series of ridiculous tweets about possible humanities dissertations on
The New Yorker website (click here).